I admit – I almost replied to a (mostly positive) listserv discussion among Missouri alums about the wisdom of now offering 25 instead of six specializations for undergraduate journalism students. I kept quiet because I didn’t want to criticize my alma mater – as did most others; the discussion quickly fizzled.

But catching the end of the weekly wjchat on Twitter, I saw that some experienced journalism professors weren’t on board with the change. Hopefully, we’ll hear more in the coming weeks about what they think.

With the changes, students can specialize in either Convergence Photojournalism or Photojournalism. They can be multi-platform designers, magazine designers or news designers. There looks to be some new media skills required for all disciplines. For example, the old-fashioned Photo-J-only students will still have to learn multimedia skills.

So I’m a little confused.

Why give students the choice to not specialize in convergence? Shouldn’t “convergence” now simply be called journalism? Are we still separating the print folks from the online?

Those other disciplines aren’t useless; I specialized in Magazine Writing as a master’s student at Mizzou because I loved to write. Those classes have helped in my career, so I’m not knocking the choice. But had I been more forward-thinking, I would have taken more than two hours in multimedia training and learned more about photography, design and the web. (Just five years ago, only one of those credit hours was required.)

Obviously a lot of thought from people more experienced and intelligent than me went into this change, so I am eager to hear more about the rationale and job prospects for these new grads. I had always understood that journalism students who specialize in a particular subject, like business or science, would have better job prospects. I don’t know if the same is true for someone specializing only in news editing or writing, or even convergence disciplines.

In high school, non-specialization is essential. I’m surprised that even now, there are high school journalism students who want to just write or just take photos and don’t want anything to do with multimedia or websites. I hope I don’t lose students in my program by requiring them to branch out to at least try other areas. But it would be irresponsible not to.

In keeping with the idea that journalists must learn technology and not rely on tech people without journalism training, I’d like to highlight a good resource to teach students computer-assisted reporting skills. Who knows, it could spark a student’s interest in becoming a programmer like these journalists that Texas State University Professor Cindy Royal wrote about in a paper she presented at the International Symposium in Online Journalism.